Cyberpunk’s redemption took both hard work and uncanny luck | Opinion

gamesindustry.biz:

Working on the basis that time heals all wounds (well, time and a hell of a lot of patches), I finally took the plunge back into Cyberpunk 2077 over the year-end holidays, and found myself enthralled by Night City – just as I’d fervently hoped I would be three years ago when the game originally launched.

So good is the game at this point, in fact, that I was happy to fork out for the Phantom Liberty expansion – a DLC pack whose very existence would have seemed laughable in December 2020, when the game’s launch condition was so breathtakingly awful that Sony took the highly unusual decision to unilaterally pull it from the PlayStation Store.

I am far from being alone in re-evaluating Cyberpunk’s charms. Last year, the launch of the well-received expansion seemed to mark the final evolution of public opinion on the game, and after a couple of years of people whispering “hey, it’s not bad now” in dark corners of the internet, it found itself being openly acclaimed.

Phantom Liberty has an attach rate of almost 25%, similar to the DLC packs for The Witcher 3, which is all the more remarkable when you consider how long after the game’s launch it appeared. Cyberpunk even made its way onto some game awards nomination lists, in rather double-edged-sword type categories like “most improved” – a category to which a game can only be nominated if it was formerly in an absolute state.

It's been a long, hard, and strange road for Cyberpunk to get here – and I think it’s worth emphasising just how long (three years, and one can only guess at the sheer number of man-hours involved), just how hard, and just how strange that journey has been, because there’s a risk that the wrong lessons might be learned from that process.

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